Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory

By Robin Reames

The widespread understanding of language in the West is that it represents the world. This view, however, has not always been commonplace. In fact, it is a theory of language conceived by Plato, culminating in The Sophist. In that dialogue Plato introduced the idea of statements as being either true or false, where the distinction between falsity and truth rests on a deeper discrepancy between appearance and reality, or seeming and being. 

Robin Reames’s Seeming & Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory marks a shift in Plato scholarship. Reames argues that an appropriate understanding of rhetorical theory in Plato’s dialogues illuminates how he developed the technical vocabulary needed to construct the very distinctions between seeming and being that separate true from false speech. By engaging with three key movements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship—the rise and subsequent marginalization of “orality and literacy theory,” Heidegger’s controversial critique of Platonist metaphysics, and the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues—Reames demonstrates how the development of Plato’s rhetorical theory across several of his dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist) has been both neglected and misunderstood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226567150

Book preview

Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory

Seeming & Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory

Robin Reames

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56701-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56715-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226567150.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reames, Robin, author.

Title: Seeming and being in Plato’s rhetorical theory / Robin Reames.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017054843 | ISBN 9780226567013 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226567150 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Rhetoric—Philosophy. | Philosophy, Ancient. | Plato. | Sophists (Greek philosophy)

Classification: LCC PN173.R43 2018 | DDC 808.0092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054843

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my father

What is so perilous, then, in the fact that people speak, and the fact that their speech proliferates? Where is the danger in that?

—Michel Foucault

Contents

Preface

INTRODUCTION   Literacy, Dramatic Form, Metaphysics: Rereading Plato’s Rhetoric

Orality, Literacy, and Rhetorical Beginnings

Martin Heidegger and the Critique of Metaphysics in the West

Literary-Dramatic Interpretations of Plato

Sophists and Sophistry in Plato

Plan of the Book

1   The Cosmetics of Sophistry: Seeming and Being in the Gorgias

The Gorgias Dialogue and the Role of the Analogy

The Problem of the Double Mu

The Kommi in Kommôtikê: Athenians and Luxury

War: The Historic Context and the Thematic Unity of the Gorgias

Conclusion

2   The Oral Poet and the Literate Sophist: Divine Madness and Rhetorical Inoculation in the Phaedrus

Rhetorical Disunity in the Phaedrus

The Speeches in Contrast

The Palinode as Epic: Themes, Formulae, Symbols

Writing and Rhetoric

Conclusion

3   Heraclitean Opposition and Parmenidean Contradiction: Pre-Socratic Ontology and Protagorean Sophistry in the Cratylus, the Theaetetus, and the Euthydemus

Heraclitean Etymologies and Protagorean Relativism in the Cratylus

The Man-Measure Doctrine and Heraclitean Flux in the Theaetetus

The Impossibility of Contradiction and Parmenidean Nonbeing in the Euthydemus

Conclusion

4   Sophistry without Measure, Dialectic without Rhetoric: The Interpretive Dispute in the Protagoras

Antilogic, Eristic, Dialectic, and the Protagoras

Socrates versus Protagoras: Simonides’s Poem in Its Dialectical Context

Socratic Sophistry, Eristic, and Antilogic in the Interpretation of Simonides

Conclusion

5   The Rhetoric of Mimêsis: Sophistic Imitation and Seeming in the Republic

Mimêsis as Language

Mimêsis as Falseness

The Dubious Metaphysics of Mimêsis

Conclusion

6   Imitators of Truth: The Rhetorical Theories of Onoma and Rhêma in the Sophist and the Cratylus

The Stranger’s Method of Division and the Sophist’s Heracliteanism

Louis Bassett and the Problem of Onoma and Rhêma

Onoma, Rhêma, and the Logos of Mimêsis

Onoma and Rhêma, Logos and Mimêsis in the Sophist

Conclusion

EPILOGUE   The Past and Future of Plato’s Rhetorical Theory

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book was born, as many are, out of a passing curiosity. In an undergraduate course on rhetoric that I taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, we were reading the Gorgias dialogue. One day in class, my students and I were breaking down the elaborate analogy in which Socrates compares rhetoric to cookery and sophistry to what is commonly translated as cosmetics. I had taught both the dialogue and the analogy numerous times before, but for some reason, on that particular day, the term cosmetics struck me as odd. It seemed out of place in the analogy, and the root in Greek was unrecognizable to me. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the term in question was anomalous and idiosyncratic, and that its translation as cosmetics was anything but straightforward. My pursuit of a better translation for the term ultimately led to this longer project. I am grateful to the students in that course for letting me teach them about Plato’s Gorgias, and in so doing, setting me on a course that would begin unlock so many of Plato’s texts, which up until that time I now believe I had been reading entirely wrongly. That simple question inducted me into the prismlike puzzle of Plato’s thought, and converted me from a reluctant reader to an acolyte.

I consulted numerous translations of the dialogues while writing this book. I have tried to prioritize those that remain conservatively faithful to Greek syntax and word choice, and are at the same time fluid and readable for a modern reader. In both of these regards, the translations of Mary Jane Levett, Robin Waterfield, and Tom Griffith have been excellent resources. In some cases I have modified translations where I felt the translator’s choices were either somewhat too loose or somewhat too turgid. When the original Greek is intended to sound archaic, I have deliberately used earlier, more formal English translations. Where I cite the dialogues, I provide both the Stephanus pagination and the translator’s last name, followed by the page number in that edition; and where I cite fragments of ancient texts, I cite the Diels-Kranz (DK) number. I hope the readers will find this helpful, should they wish to look something up for themselves, and not too distracting visually. For this reason, the texts of the dialogues are listed in the bibliography according to the translator’s last name. I have noted each place where I adjust or amend a translation. Primary sources that are referenced but not quoted are not included in the bibliography. There are a number of secondary sources that guided my reading or led me to other sources but are not explicitly cited in the text. They are included in the bibliography.

Because, as I explain in the introduction, one of the aims of this book is to offer an interpretation that is not overreliant on or presumptive about the metaphysical underpinnings of Plato’s thought, I have chosen to transliterate as opposed to translate several terms that I feel carry far too much metaphysical baggage, or whose meaning is too broad and varied to be translated in one way only. For example, psychê, logos, and eidos, commonly translated respectively as soul, reason, and Form, presume to varying degrees the preexistence of a transcendent metaphysics that Plato left in his wake but that did not exist fully formed at the time of his writing. I do not believe we have suitable terms in English that correspond with these Greek concepts. My own sense is that psychê meant something along the lines of human life–perception–force; logos meant speech, but not in any sense that is captured by the English word speech; and eidos meant figure-concept. Similarly, technê, commonly translated as art, meant way of skilled making or doing, and mimêsis meant many things to Plato, from impersonating, to emulating, to imitating, to representing. Translating these terms in the above ways, however, would obscure rather than clarify the ideas, so I have opted to leave the terms transliterated. I include various other Greek words and phrases where I think they may be important for readers of Greek.

A project like this is never a solitary endeavor, and many people have offered invaluable help and encouragement along the way. I am grateful first and foremost to my partner and interlocutor par excellence, Drew Dalton, for encouraging me to pursue this project when it was only an idle question, and for discussing these ideas with me at various stages along the way. Ed Schiappa, Marina McCoy, and Jerry Graff generously shared their time in reading early drafts of chapters and in some cases the entire manuscript, and offered superb advice and feedback. The anonymous reviewers for Philosophy and Rhetoric and Gerard Hauser provided critical guidance on what would become the first chapter. Several colleagues—Thomas Rickert, Connie Meinwald, Ralph Cintron, Nasser Mufti, Tarini Bedi, Tatjana Gajic, Bob Somol, Cynthia Blair, Susan Levine, and Michael Schandorf—very helpfully and generously participated in a stimulating conversation regarding the second chapter. Heartfelt thanks for their copious and thoughtful feedback. Several colleagues offered encouragement and interest in the project along the way; special thanks to Jerry Murphy, Sean O’Rourke, Sir Brian Vickers, Carol Poster, Bob Sullivan, Brian Gogan, and many others.

I would also like to thank my colleagues and dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who have been an exquisite web of inspiration and support: Dean Astrida Tantillo, Walter Benn Michaels, Lisa Freeman, Mary Beth Rose, Mark Canuel, Anna Kornbluh, Jennifer Ashton, Jeffrey Gore, and Nanno Marinatos—my deepest thanks to you all. To the graduate students who participated in a seminar on rhetoric and aesthetics, our conversations were highly productive and covered many of the themes that would become the content of this book. I am grateful to my mentor and former professor, Paul Hopper, who very helpfully introduced me to the work of Louis Bassett.

Thanks also are due to the intrepid editorial team at the University of Chicago Press, Susan Bielstein and James Toftness, who made this publication possible; and to Andrew Osborne and Johanna Rosenbohm, who offered superb copyediting assistance in the final stages of the project. All remaining errors are, of course, my own.

I am particularly appreciative of my colleagues, college, university, Dean Tantillo, and the UIC Humanities Institute, its committee, and its directors, Susan Levine and Linda Vavra, for facilitating the Humanities Institute fellowship (2015/16) and research awards (2015, 2016, and 2017), which gave me the time and funds to complete this project. Gratitude is also due to the librarians and support staff at the Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; the Bodleian Library; the British Library; and Trinity College Library at Cambridge University, without whose service and collections my scholarship would be far less robust.

And finally, I am grateful to my daughter, Thea, who daily prods me never to be boring; and to my parents for teaching me the value of hard work.

Aspects of the book were explored as conference papers at the biennial meetings of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric Society of America from 2013 to 2017. An early version of the first chapter appeared as "Seeming and Being in the ‘Cosmetics’ of Sophistry: The Infamous Analogy of Plato’s Gorgias," Philosophy and Rhetoric 49, no. 1 (2015): 74–97. It is used with permission from the Penn State University Press.

INTRODUCTION

Literacy, Dramatic Form, Metaphysics

Rereading Plato’s Rhetoric

Language represents the world, or so we are told. Although language may be in the world, it is not of the world. Rather, we have been led to believe that it is held at a remove from nature, from entropy, from the flux of phusis, and the arrow of time. This remove is maintained by the essential signifying power of language, so the story goes, predicated on an eternal logic, or a universal grammar, if not a symbolic system of differentiation. According to this logic, this grammar, this system, language and the statements it composes are true when they represent the world rightly and false when they represent it wrongly. So foundational is this belief about language that it allows only meager room for critique or question—surely the fact that language represents the world is not a modifiable belief. It could not merely be a matter of historical and contingent development. Certainly, as a proposition, the division between true and false is neither arbitrary, nor modifiable, nor institutional, nor violent (Foucault 1972, 218).

Indeed, this representational view of language is all these things: modifiable, historical, contingent, arbitrary, and institutional. It is, in fact, a theory of language that was invented by Plato, who introduced for the first time in his Sophist dialogue the idea of language-as-statement and of statements being either true or false, where truth and falsity rest on a distinction between being and seeming, or reality and appearance. It was not creation ex nihilo, to be sure, but it nevertheless constituted a permanent break between what language had been and what it would become.

That Plato is the inventor of this irrevocable and now ubiquitous idea of language has been generally acknowledged.¹ Until now, however, it has not been established how Plato created it out of his rhetorical theory.² The aim of this book is to show how the ideas of language-as-statement and true and false discourse emerged as a by-product of Plato’s invention of rhetorical theory, weapons forged for battle with the sophists.

A robust appreciation of how Plato developed the assertion necessarily requires a significant revision to the standard view of rhetoric in Plato. This view is summarized as follows: Plato was rhetoric’s most ardent critic. He held it in contempt or extreme distrust, believing it to be a sham art, a threat to true philosophy, and an inferior method to dialectic. It deals with belief and not knowledge; with appearance and seeming, not reality; with what is plausible rather than what is true. It is a knack, not an art; and a form of deception, trickery, and persuasion. Hence rhetoric is mere rhetoric—the lesser counterpart of philosophy, useful only for speaking to ignorant masses for whom more rational methods are ineffectual. He may have offered marginal and grudging allowance for it in the Phaedrus dialogue, but only as an ideal that sacrifices practical effectiveness. This view—which is nearly ubiquitous in the general summaries of the history of rhetoric—has undergone very little revision in the past century, despite seismic changes in Plato scholarship as a whole. To illuminate how Plato invented the concept of the statement, this book challenges this standard interpretation. I suggest that Plato has Socrates invent rhetorical theory even as he has him seem to disparage rhetoric, and this rhetorical theory, created over the course of several dialogues, capacitates his theory of language-as-statement. This is displayed most clearly and compellingly in his theories of mimêsis, onoma, and rhêma, developed in the Republic, Cratylus, and Sophist dialogues. These dialogues, and the rhetorical theories they package, provide an antidote to the poetic power, overwhelming influence, and epistemic peril of the sophists’ words, displayed in the Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, and Euthydemus dialogues.

Through this analysis, I aim to fill what I believe is a longstanding gap in Plato scholarship and in scholarship in the history of rhetoric. Namely, scholarship that considers the role and status of rhetoric and rhetorical theory in Plato’s dialogues has been inadequately revised in light of three key developments in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship and philosophy. These developments include (1) the rise and subsequent marginalization of so-called orality and literacy theory, (2) the not-uncontroversial critique of Platonist metaphysics initiated by Martin Heidegger, and (3) the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues. While each of these movements, which I describe below, has left a permanent mark—for the better—on how we read and understand Plato’s work as a whole, these interpretive transformations have not yet synthetically redefined the dominant view of how Plato represents rhetoric and uses rhetorical theory within the dialogues. Indeed, as David D. Corey has claimed, with few exceptions, the revolution in Platonic interpretation that has occurred gradually over the past century and enriched our understanding of Plato’s thinking and his purposes has not made its way to the banks of sophistic scholarship (2015, 11); and the same may be said of rhetorical scholarship. In the following three sections, I provide an overview of these three movements, which inform the methodological assumptions behind each analysis offered in this study. While these movements will be familiar to Plato scholars, historians of rhetoric, and philosophers, they are nevertheless not without their critics. I offer these summaries both as a justification of each as well as a rationale for their integration as a unified method for interpreting Plato’s dialogues.

Orality, Literacy, and Rhetorical Beginnings

For a time in the mid-twentieth century, the work of the so-called Toronto school ignited a major revolution in how Plato was understood and read. Following the studies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who hypothesized that the methods of oral composition still in use in the early part of the twentieth century by itinerant Balkan bards might offer an answer to the Homeric question, there emerged a new understanding about the fundamental differences between oral and literate language and thought. Based on the findings published in Lord’s Singer of Tales (1960), which was the culmination of Parry’s unpublished research, the Odyssey and the Iliad came to be read as a repository for Greek oral ways of speaking and thinking, defined primarily by memorable formulaicity containing concrete (as opposed to abstract) vocabulary, which was committed to writing only sometime during the eighth century BCE. On the basis of these findings—with the accompanying scholarship that suggests that Greek culture was entirely oral up until the mid-eighth century BCE, and that the rise of literacy in Greece both coincided with and prompted the rise of pre-Socratic philosophy—Eric Havelock wrote his masterwork Preface to Plato, published in 1963, and suggested that much of Plato’s thought can be explained by the fact that he was living in the midst of the Greek literate revolution. In that revolution, the development and spread of writing technology made it possible to replace a concrete vocabulary and its attendant thought system with a new taxonomy of abstract terms and concepts. The abstract forms of thought that would become Western rationality were born.³ Havelock’s work, along with that of his colleague at the University of Toronto Harold Innis, influenced Marshall McLuhan’s predictions about mass media in the 1960s and ’70s, and by extension laid the groundwork for the great synthetic study by McLuhan’s student Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982). Ong applied these findings more broadly to oral and literate cultures writ large and suggested key distinctions between oral and literate ways of thinking; he also predicted the advent of a secondary orality, given what seemed to be the implosive trajectory of what McLuhan ([1964] 2003) famously called electric technology.

It was these later developments in the movement that ultimately determined the fate of orality and literacy theory, a field of investigation that has fallen out of fashion in the last thirty years. Not only did the rise of digital (as opposed to electric) media radically shift the trajectory away from a secondary orality, making the projections of Ong and McLuhan seem outdated and incorrect, the great divide between oral and literate cultures—which, in its fullest articulation by Ong, associated the former with concrete thought and a lack of analytical, objective, or strictly rational vocabulary and the latter with abstract vocabulary and decidedly rational, logical, and objective ways of thinking—was criticized for committing the fallacies of hasty generalization and false cause. In brief, it was argued that the 1931 studies by neuropsychologist Alexander Luria that Ong cited may have discovered the same linguistic and conceptual distinctions that separate Homer from Plato; but this similarity alone is not enough to make broad cross-cultural claims about orality and literacy as such. Moreover, while literacy may have been a contributing factor to the linguistic and intellectual transformations that took place between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE, to claim that literacy or the literate revolution was the primary or only cause of these changes is to overlook the more important factor of institutional power that determines how literacy circulates and the ends toward which it is employed.⁴ While these criticisms are not without merit, they should not tempt us to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.

In contrast to the relative absence of orality and literacy theory in Plato scholarship of recent years, its influence has fared comparatively better in the history of rhetoric. Precisely because rhetoric was the first discipline devoted to the self-conscious study and theorizing about discourse and language, the idea that the rise of literacy in Greece was crucial and essential to its development (by enabling the assimilation of the very taxonomies that would later become the corpus of rhetorical theory), has been comparatively less controversial. Because rhetoric as a discipline is the architectonic discourse on language, its very existence requires the ability to analyze language as language. This could only be done once language was externalized via writing.

This, in essence, is one of the prime motivations for Thomas Cole’s important study The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (1991) and for Edward Schiappa’s The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (1999). Cole insists that the earliest developments in rhetorical theory were first and foremost a result of Plato’s groundbreaking work, for which there is no comparable model in any earlier text:

For the rhetorician’s preoccupation with controlling the medium of transmission to come into play, two developments had to take place, neither of which would have occurred when it did without the contribution of Plato and Aristotle. First, audiences and composers had to acquire the habit of abstracting essential messages from verbal contexts: the informative core of any piece of communication from its non- or extra-informative—that is, rhetorical—residue. . . . Second, a written eloquence had to come into being—that is, a body of prose texts which might be read or delivered verbatim and still suggest the excitement, atmosphere, and commitment of a spontaneous oral performance or debate. Plato—along with, to a lesser degree, the other Socratics and the orator Isocrates—was the first to compose such texts. Without such texts there would have been no satisfactory data base on which to conduct the detailed precise analysis of the verbal medium that is characteristic of rhetoric. (1991, x)

For Cole, the absolute separability of a speaker’s message from the message used to transmit it (1991, 12) appears for the first time in ancient literature in the Phaedrus dialogue (1991, 35), where Plato deliberately displays, on the one hand, a written speech, and on the other hand, a theoretical vocabulary based on its analysis. Prior to this, Cole argues, there is a glaring absence of detailed analysis . . . everywhere in protorhetoric (1991, 111). This leads to the conclusion that the metalanguage that would have made analysis possible simply did not exist at the time to any significant degree (1991, 111). I would extend Cole’s claim to include many more of Plato’s dialogues, wherein the interlocutors examine discourse that has been detached from its spoken performance, and on the basis of that examination, produce a theoretical vocabulary about discourse—what Cole refers to as metalanguage. Plato displays again and again the same process that Cole identifies in the Phaedrus: through Socrates’s discussions of texts that were available in writing both to him and to his readers, he engages in a critical evaluation of their language as language, which results in a metalinguistic vocabulary. This in essence is the development of rhetorical theory, and it illuminates through explicit demonstration how it is that reading and literacy enable self-conscious distance from and evaluation of language, which results in abstract theorizations and rhetorical terminology, or language about language. As Andrea Nightingale contends, the fourth-century Greeks’ spectator theory of knowledge, or theoria, was reliant on the themes of surveying or seeing from a distance. Rhetorical theory refers to precisely this kind of operation with a written text; by surveying it from a distance and, as it were, having a look at it, one is able not only to use discourse but to theorize about it.

In agreement with Cole’s groundbreaking study, Schiappa (1990) proposes the term rhêtorikê is Plato’s intellectual property, and rhetorics that emerge outside the Platonic lineage are not rhetorical in the formal sense, so the term rhetorical theory ought to be confined to texts containing explicit discussion of rules and principles of rhetoric which may or may not influence the compositional practices of others (1999, 109). As Robert Wardy (1996) has similarly observed, the loose, generic uses of the term rhetoric indicate an impoverished awareness of the rich, complex, labyrinthine history of its development in Plato and Aristotle, and particularly of the theoretical metalanguage that filled the very content of the future discipline. "Once named, Schiappa writes, intellectual practices can become what we can loosely call a discipline" (1999, 186).

The argument I pursue here is at heart a logical extension of Cole’s and Schiappa’s examination of the beginning of rhetoric and rhetorical theory: because Plato’s dialogues are the first and most important extant texts from the ancient world to demonstrate this process of creating, on the basis of an analysis of written eloquence, a theoretical metalanguage, I investigate how those texts function as contributions to fourth-century-BCE rhetorical theory. In this way, I not only restrict the term rhetorical theory to texts that contain this explicitly theoretical content in the way that Schiappa recommends, I likewise strictly identify that theoretical content first and foremost as rhetorical theory wherever it appears, even if it is in a genre not typically identified as rhetorical, as is the case with Plato’s dialogues. I use the term rhetorical theory specifically to denote what Plato, in coining the term rhêtorikê, was attempting to define. By externalizing and stabilizing language, what was once visceral, ephemeral, and aural became stable, fixed, and examinable. This had the effect of creating a self-consciousness about language and verbal skill and an ability to survey and evaluate it from a distance. In the oral world, one was subjected to the power and force of language. Once that language could be inscribed, its powerful force could be questioned, studied, and repeated. Rhetoric was the metadiscursive technique that made possible repeatable and replicable linguistic power. In Plato’s coining of the term, we find not just oratory, but self-consciousness about oratory: how it is produced, its essential components, and its identifiable and predictable effects.

Martin Heidegger and the Critique of Metaphysics in the West

The second revolution in the last century that I bring to bear on the understanding of rhetoric in Plato is the critique of the development of metaphysics in the West initiated by Martin Heidegger, and in particular, the role of Plato’s treatment of the sophists in that development. This too is not an uncontroversial source to call on in interpreting Plato, given both the fact that Heidegger’s prioritization of the Greeks is difficult to dissociate from his Nazism and the skepticism with which his interpretations of the ancients is held. Heidegger’s explicit epitomizing of the Greek language and Greek thought is highly suspect, both politically and philosophically, precisely because he viewed the German language and German philosophy as its sole true heir.⁵ The seeming inextricability of his ethnocentrism, Nazism, and epitomizing of the Greeks, therefore, makes it highly problematic to rely on him as a commentator on Greek thought and Greek language. Moreover, the critique of his whimsical, feeble, or imaginative etymological investigations has long alienated Heidegger from any serious classics scholarship.⁶ While the importance of Greek thinkers from the pre-Socratics to Aristotle in Heidegger’s phenomenology is a well-explored area of scholarly inquiry, his reliability as a scholar and a commentator on that tradition is at best highly contested.⁷ The residue of this, of course, was memorably defined in the preface to the English edition of Marcel Detienne’s monumental The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (1996). On the one hand, Detienne claims, Heideggerians and ‘deconstructionists’ have built a veritable wall to separate themselves from the explorations of Greek scholars, while on the other hand Greek scholars hastily dismiss Heidegger, despite the fact that the only real innovator in Greek thought is Heidegger (1996, 26).

And yet it is possible, I believe, to lean on Heidegger as a reader of Greek philosophy while still avoiding these two pitfalls. Neither Heidegger’s epitomization of Greek Dasein nor his dubious etymologies is essential to his account of the development of Platonist metaphysics in the history of philosophy, and it is this account, painted in broad strokes, that I believe may safely and incisively reorient our understanding of the development of rhetorical theory in Plato’s texts.⁸

Of particular importance for this study is the apogee of Heidegger’s 1935 lecture course, Einführung in die Metaphysik, published in English as Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953. The course was the first of Heidegger’s works to be published in English, and despite the fact that Heidegger himself referred to it as a further elucidation of the question of being developed in his masterwork Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), originally published in 1927, it is not the elucidation of Greek Dasein that is the true value of the work. Rather, the section that traces a series of four chronological steps in the history of philosophy—or The Restriction of Being—that Heidegger claims constituted development of metaphysics in the West, helps, I believe, to define more precisely the crucial role that rhetoric played in the development of Platonist metaphysics. In other words, it is Heidegger’s analysis of how Platonist metaphysics developed though the differentiation